Four episodes into Tiger & Bunny 2, I think what strikes me more than anything is how alike to the first season it is. Even more so than with most sequels after long absences, it feels eerily as if you’ve gone back in time. Heck, even the animation looks pretty much the same as it did a decade ago – despite all that time, a studio name change, and a trip to Netflix. That’s not remotely a bad approach to take with a sequel – if you can pull it off. Recapturing the charm of the original is probably the safest course to winning the viewers’ hearts.
When we speak of the “charm” of Tiger & Bunny, I think it’s quite simple in the main. That is to say, watching this “heroes” be loveable dorks. They pretty much all are in their own way – flawed but decent individuals whose only exceptional quality is their circumstances. We’ve added a couple of new players (even “Golden Ryan” Goldsmith was an addition for the movies), and the formal establishment of the buddy system is a significant tweak. But neither it or the newer cast members feel out of place. If this had all been one long continuous season, I don’t think anybody would have done a double-take.
The focus of the third ep is mostly on Blue Rose. She’s still in love with the most loveable (and dorkiest) of the bunch, Kotetsu. And she manages to get him to herself on an assignment – to visit a young girl who says she’s seriously ill and that the two of them (Tiger is #2) are her favorite heroes. She tells Kotetsu in secret to as not to upset Barnaby, who she says would “say it was fine and hurt inside”. But this leads the wild imagination of Golden Ryan to concoct the idea that the two of them are planning to drop their respective partners and team up. It’s BS of course – and Barnaby never quite buys into it – but as it turns out, Ryan has good reason to feel a little paranoid.
To be honest I don’t even remember the “Dressing Room Thief” – in my defense, it’s been a decade – but he was a secondary villain in Episode 14. Unfortunately we don’t get any real progress on the Tiger & Rose front (I kind of doubt we ever will), but there are some very good moments here. I found the bit with Rock Bison’s guttural workout moans drowning out most of Alex’s video of Kotetsu and Karina’s conversation to be outright hilarious (if just a little creepy).
The theme of partner dynamics continues to be the one constant running through all of the first four episodes, and next it’s Fire Emblem and Sky High’s turn. They’re the current #1 ranked team, and in truth the problems between them are pretty low-key – Nathan just wants Keith to be a little more vulnerable around him. But Tiger is desperate to give advice to somebody as that’s kind of this thing and he’s not getting much love that way, and he’s only too happy to be all over Fire Emblem’s problem. His advice isn’t especially helpful but it does haver a certain unpretentious honesty to it. This is really a man who doesn’t know how to fake it, no matter the circumstances.
One interesting this that comes out of this sequence is the reminder that Kotetsu and Barnaby have never gone out for drinks together. We think of these two as extremely close, and I think Nathan is right that the way they don’t bottle up any issues they have with each other is quite healthy. But their relationship is mainly a working one, and I do rather hope we see them start to change that this season. Things between Fire Emblem and Sky High get resolved at an event celebrating the opening of a new building that turns out to be a death trap, an event which includes a heckler who might as easily have turned up in HeroAca.
Even the big bad, it seems, is consistent with the first season. It never seemed less than certain but it’s now an open secret that Ouroboros is behind the two idiot villains who keep showing up in the epilogue. Even that format is pretty much a dead ringer for the first season, and I think we can assume this one will follow the same pattern – a lot of side stories with minor connections to the recurring plot, and then Ouroboros taking center stage in the final arc.
